Pokémon GO's Earth Day Rewards Are Live Now -- And They've Been Extended

Yesterday was Earth Day in Pokémon GO, and trainers turned out to pick up trash. Developer Niantic Labs was promising in-game rewards for players that turned up at certain cleanup events, of which there were 68 total around the world. 4,000 trainers showed up in total, and that means that they were able to unlock the highest reward tier -- 3 times the Stardust on all Grass, Earth and Water-type Pokémon. The rewards start now and will run until April 30, so go out and get catching. Stardust remains one of the most valuable resources in the game, particularly for high-level trainers that don't have much to do but train out powerful teams of creatures designed for soloing and duoing challenging Raids.

Mission Blue was a uniquely Pokémon GO -- and uniquely Niantic Labs -- event. What was most striking about it was that while people surely played Pokémon GO at the cleanup events, there wasn't actually any in-game activity involved in unlocking these rewards. That's the particular sort of augmented reality that Niantic is pursuing to a T: the company is interested in overlaying images of monsters onto phone cameras, no doubt, but this is closer to the concept of augmented reality as put out by Pokémon GO. It's less about the images and more about finding ways for the virtual world to interact in meaningful ways with the real one.

As I wrote yesterday, it's a tough vision to achieve on a global scale. Pokémon GO may reach millions of people in all sorts of places around the world, but real-life events are always going to be constrained by the personal touch required to pull them off. You see some of the conflicts with things like EX Raids, which strive to bridge the gap by providing a slightly more special experience that's still generated algorithmically, and wind up absorbing all the problems of both algorithmic and tailored events while they're at it.

I still love these sorts of things, even if they're a bit trickier to pull off than an event that just doubles experience for X amount of time. I'm excited to see how the developer continues to improve them going forward, as well as how they'll work in the upcoming Harry Potter: Wizards Unite.